Surveys are an important tool for researchers. It is increasingly important to develop powerful means for analyzing such data and to extract knowledge that could help in decision-making. Survey attributes are typically discrete data measured on a Likert scale. The process of classification becomes complex if the number of survey attributes is large. Another major issue in Likert-Scale data is the uniqueness of tuples. A large number of unique tuples may result in a large number of patterns. The main focus of this paper is to propose an efficient knowledge extraction method that can extract knowledge in terms of rules. The proposed method consists of two phases. In the first phase, the network is trained and pruned. In the second phase, the decision tree is applied to extract rules from the trained network. Extracted rules are optimized to obtain a comprehensive and concise set of rules. In order to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method, it is applied to two sets of Likert scale survey data, and results show that the proposed method produces rule sets that are comparable with other knowledge extraction techniques in terms of the number of rules and accuracy.

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This article was originally published with ScienceDirect under a Creative Commons license. doi:10.1016/j.procs.2013.09.299